You don't have to

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that same kind of treachery when somebody tries to pass off a piece of AI-generated work as if it were their own voice.

There's a flaw in the Milli Vanilli argument. The band had no input into their songs. They 'performed' them by lip-syncing on stage, but all of the music and lyrics were someone elses. Milli Vanilli had no part in the creative process.

That's not technically true of AI content. There's some tiny little seed of a creative starting point in the form of a prompt needed for AI. When someone makes something with Claude or Nano Banana it's based on their idea, with their prompt, and their taste selecting whether the output is an acceptable artefact of what they wanted to make. I don't think you can just disregard that. They might not have wielded the IDE or camera or whatever, and you might believe that prompting and selecting which output you like has no value, but you can't claim there's no input or creativity required from the author. There is.

I see a lot of arguing over whether this is "good" or not. This seems like a subjective question. Some people enjoy it, if you don't, it wasn't written for you--don't read it.

Maybe the arguing is really over whether it's higher-status to enjoy longform content, or to criticize it for not being more efficient? By identifying the argument, I've revealed it as silly, and clearly proven myself to be higher status than either side. The arguing may stop now. You're welcome.

I think this essay illustrates pretty well the value in indulging an experience not just for the sake of it but to try and truly know it emotionally.. and perhaps also given some of the responses, it is rightly counterbalancing a lack of appreciation and understanding for anyone doing just that.

I do wonder the prospects of any etsy-like outcome for largely hand crafted software though. While you can personally find stylistic expression in the craft i'm not sure how apparent the nuances of crafting code is to users of the product beyond the requirements of a UX design and vision. It's hard not to imagine generation industrializing a lot of this part of the craft of making software.

For me I think the important thing to not lose sight as we use generation more and more in software is our care for the work piece. It feels like care, and deep understanding are set up to become further valuable rarities in the future as we become less and less intimately involved and we have to be intentional about in order to keep.

I feel like there is some parallels here to industrial designers and their desire to hold on to obsessing about and understanding the details in the face of using industrialized tooling and being very much removed from the intimate feeling of crafting every millimetre. Deeply caring is still meaningful and valuable even if it isn't minimally required.

I accidently clicked on the article instead of the comments link for this one, a rare mistake as I usually glance at the comments before deciding to read, but I'm glad I did in this case.

I read it all, and found myself engaged throughout. Not to say that it was all riveting, there were certainly dryer spots than others, but it felt 'real'. Maybe they did use AI (I somehow doubt that given the content), but even if they did they went over everything in a way that retained a voice that felt authentic.

I hate many of the articles I read now all feel like they have the same half hearted attempt at trying to grab your attention without every actually clearly saying what they mean.

As for the content, I had actually just been told by management this last week that I need to become AI 'fluent' as part of future performance evaluations and I have been deeply conflicted about it. I do think AI has value to add, but I don't think it's something that should be forced and so this article resonated with me.

It's a long read, and not for everyone, but I recommend it as a way of hearing another humans opinion and deciding for yourself if it has value.

I liked the phrase "Aislop's fables".

It’s a very principled and well reasoned stance. Think it underestimates the relentlessness of progress and capitalism though. Short of those that are independently wealthy and can do artisanal things for the sake of it I suspect most shortly won’t have a choice

> then I become a little pissed off at having my time and attention wasted by somebody who didn’t care enough about what they were doing to actually do that thing.

I remember people saying this about emails vs postal mail.

I for one enjoyed this very long essay. It should've been a lot shorter, but you also didn't have to read it, it says right there in the title :)

Beautifully written.

> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize.

The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.

To nobody in particular: I loved this article, and all the little jokes and asides.

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Tl;dr:

Over sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models very much but might in the future

"If I cared as much as I want you to, I'd have written a shorter article"

This was so wordy I had to ask an LLM to tell me what the point is.

So you don't have to:

"you don’t have to embrace a trend, tool, or narrative simply because others say you should — especially if it doesn’t resonate with you or align with your values"

An important new twist to add to the great AI versus NO AI discussion.